>
>So, at least for me, those movements were the concrete insight into US
>imperialism. That's how I learned and gained insights into what the US
>was doing around the world well below the news radar here and beyond
>the usual war headlines. Later much of the rhetoric of the Third World
>movements was turned into liberal mush, going under the trade name of
>Multiculturalism.
>
We would do well to dwell on this moment. It is an extremely powerful
moment in terms of its
ability to cause mass confusion. And it is still being put to good use.
Alexander Cockburn put me wise to it in one of his essays. He was talking about McNeil Lehrer Report and how its balanced format hid a deeper and more important truth. (I can't fucking believe I actually found the quote in Cockburn's fucking unindexed "Corruptions of Empire.")
" The Macneil/Lehrer Report started in October 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate. It was a show dedicated to the proposition that there are two sides to every question, a valuable corrective in a period when the American people had finally decided that there were absolutely and definitely not two sides to every question. Nixon was a crook who had rightly been driven from office; corporations were often headed by crooks who carried hot money around in suitcases; federal officials were crooks who broke the law on the say so of the president.
It was a dangerous moment, for a citizenry suddenly imbued with the notion that there is not only a thesis and antithesis, but also a synthesis, is a citizenry capable of al manner of harm to the harmonious motions of the status quo.
Thus came the 'MacNeil/Lehrer Report," sponsored by public-television funds and by the most powerful corporate forces in America, in the form of Exxon, AT&T and the Bell System, and other upstanding bodies. Back to Sunday school went the excited viewers, to be instructed that reality, as conveyed to them by television, is not an exciting affair of crooked businessmen and lying politicians, but a serious continuum in which parties may disagree but in which all involved are struggling manfully and disinterestedly for the public weal.
The narcotizing, humorless properties of the 'MacNeil/Lehrer Report," familiar to anyone who has felt fatigue creep over him at 7:40 Eastern time, are crucial to the show. Tedium os of the essence, since the all-but-conscious design of the program is to project vacuous dithering ("And now for another view of Hitler...") into the mind of the viewer, until he is properly convinced that there is not one answer to "the problem" but two or even three, and that since two answer are no better than none, he might as well not bother with the problem at all."
So, just at the point -- sixties/seventies -- where the myth of civilizing empire begins to be taken apart, to be exposed for the cruelty, destruction, barabarism, presumption that underlies its process, just at that point, we are taught that there are surely, certainly, and definitely always at least two sides to every question. Enlightenment ideals, like those embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, begin to look oh so gauche, so unsophisticated, so old school, so hegemonic....compared to the new discovery that racism, misogyny, slavery are cultural practices and that to challenge them is tantamount to western oppression. The black ghettos do not have a culture that values education, is it fair to impose our notions of literacy on them? Muslim women's identity as women is given by the veil. Is it fair to ask that they be exposed to the male gaze? What is the balanced view of global warming?
There's a lot of crap hiding under the multicultural umbrella. How frightened are you to say in public that in some situations there is indeed only one truth. Half a dozen people will call you a fascist. Some of them will be radical leftists.
>At this point in time, it takes a considerable amount of historical
>back tracking to see the direct connection between the neoconservative
>rise to power as a reaction to the apparent loss of traditional
>american values, the neconservative political assaults on what some
>liberals and progressives defend and call multicuturalism, and the
>neoconservative global and imperialistic positioning of the US in its
>foreign wars in the Middle East and more covertly in Columbia and
>Venezuela.
>
Multiculturalism is the new version of cold war liberalism. Beware.
Joanna